Texas is having a difficult time finding enough prison guards. 

A Panhandle Times report on the staffing levels in Texas prisons last fall found that more than a quarter of the jobs were unfilled.

The problem was much worse at prisons such as Coffield, Telford, Connally, Clements, Dalhart, Daniel and Smith, which had staffing levels below 55%, according to the report. In total, Texas has 100 prison facilities on 83 properties on 124,000 acres and contracts with one private facility to house inmates, the Panhandle Times reported.

Telford is one of the most severely understaffed, the Texas Tribune reported in 2018.

At that time, Telford had 65% staffing, but was still 200 guards short of what it is authorized to have, the story said. The newspaper also reported that because of the staffing issues at the time, inmates rarely went outside and were underfed.

“Working those longer hours and having that safety aspect in the back of your mind that maybe you’re not as safe as you should be or as you were, it wears on you,” one former officer, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Tribune. “I’ve known [officers] to get physically ill at the mere thought of going to Telford.”

Telford, in Bowie County, has the most guards assaulted of any Texas prison, the story said. In 2015, guard Timothy Davison was murdered by an inmate serving time to burglary and aggravated assault, the Tribune reported. After Davison’s death, the number of vacant guard positions soared, the story said.

The shortage of guards is not limited to Texas. In a South Carolina prison, 44 officers were guarding 1,500 inmates when a riot erupted and the guards had to wait more than four hours for backup, the Tribune reported in 2018.

“There’s probably no aspect of prison operations that’s more important to safety than appropriate levels of staffing,” Michele Deitch, an attorney and senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, told the Tribune.